UW ADAI - Symposium - 2022 - Comments From Public Officials
(September 16, 2022)

Here are some observations from the Friday September 16th University of Washington Addictions, Drugs, and Alcohol Institute (UW ADAI) 2022 Symposium on “High-THC Cannabis in Legal Regulated Markets.”

My top 3 takeaways:

• Shelley Kloba, Chair of the Washington State House Commerce and Gaming Committee (WA House COG), spoke to the role she saw for behavioral health policy in cannabis regulation and the need for a “360 degree view” of the subject (audio - 5m, video).
  • Representing the first legislative district, Kloba led the Washington State House of Representatives (WA House) committee responsible for oversight on “alcohol, tobacco, cannabis, and gambling.” With her background “in kinesiology and physiology,” she considered them to be “all substances or activities that mankind has used, ever since they figured ‘em out, to change their brain chemistry in some way that seems appealing.” All four had drawbacks in Kloba’s estimation and “there is some mitigation that I think we have a responsibility for as a state that derives revenue from these activities” in part since “we want to regulate them so that they are safe, and fair, and that we're able to have the funding available to mitigate any of the harms…and do some prevention work.”
    • Kloba served as vice chair of WA House COG starting in 2017 before being appointed chair in January 2021.
    • Previous private events which Kloba offered remarks at include:
      • The panel “Fortifying Washington State in Preparation for Federalization” at the Washington State Cannabis Summit (WA Cannabis Summit) sponsored by The Cannabis Alliance in September 2021.
      • A legislative panel at the Washington CannaBusiness Association (WACA) Spring Meeting on June 15th.
      • As a keynote speaker at the WA Cannabis Summit on October 1st.
  • “I feel like I'm an accidental tourist to the cannabis industry,” explained Kloba, “I had really almost no awareness of it prior to becoming a” WA House COG member “but since I got on that committee, I felt like I had an obligation to learn as much as I could.” She said the resulting “interesting journey” involved researchers from UW and Washington State University (WSU) whom she lauded for “the multitude of different ways that they have encouraged studies and the way that they reach out to legislators, like me, to help to educate me.”
  • Kloba wanted to legislate cannabis from a “fact-based perspective and we need to look at a 360 degree view of the whole entire thing.” She recognized “one of the things we're looking at here is…largely from a behavioral health perspective” and appreciated an “additional perspective of market, and market forces, and how that has an impact on usage. But, I also know that it is a far more complicated substance with a very long history.” Kloba noted the “great potential for benefits…and creating some real solutions for various medical conditions that really plague people.” Moreover, cannabis was something she perceived as carrying “a great deal of stigma attached to it.” Saying “some of you that are my age or older, almost your entire life this has been a product that has been illegal,” stated Kloba, with “a whole entire racist-based history of the product that, whether we understand it or not, is a part of our bias as we think about it.” This “makes it even more important, I think, that we are able to have an objective look at the facts,” she added. 
  • Thanking the symposium’s organizers and guests “for being engaged in this” as well as “digging in deep to all of these various facets,” Kloba’s goal was “to be able to learn from all of you and I hope that you'll feel comfortable in reaching out.”
  • WA House COG scheduled a December 2nd work session concerning "Regulatory and enforcement activities related to cannabinoid products, including products containing delta-8-[tetrahydrocannabinol] THC or other cannabinoids that are synthetically derived from hemp."
  • At time of publication, Kloba was running for re-election to her seat against Republican Jerome Zeiger-Buccola.

• Representative Lauren Davis promised further legislation would be needed to respond to "a generational increase" in mental health problems she attributed to high cannabinoid concentration items protected by a “predatory industry" which reflexively opposed product bans (audio - 8m, video).
  • Davis thanked their hosts at UW, particularly Beatriz Carlini, UW ADAI Research Scientist in charge of the ADAI Cannabis Education and Research Program (CERP) and the symposium Program Chair. Representing the 32nd legislative district, she knew she had “a fairly unique and unusual space in the drug policy debate. Substance use disorder is my professional background and it's largely what I work on in the legislature.”
    • At time of publication, Davis worked as the Strategic Director of the Washington Recovery Alliance (WRA) and had a history of advocacy for substance abuse treatment. Her legislative biography says her initial “crusade” was for “‘Ricky’s Law’ which “created an involuntary crisis commitment system for youth and adults with life-threatening addiction...one of the largest single investments in addiction treatment in Washington state history.”
      • The Washington State Institute for Public Policy (WSIPP), published a preliminary report on the law in December 2020 and a follow up paper in June 2021, “Designated Crisis Responders and Ricky’s Law: Involuntary Treatment Investigation, Decision, and Placement.”
    • In January 2020, Davis introduced HB 2546, “Concerning the potency of marijuana products,” at a public hearing in WA House COG. Most attendees present from the cannabis sector were opposed. The bill wasn’t advanced, but an operating budget proviso mandated the creation of “Frameworks for Future Cannabis Research.” That December, UW ADAI and WSU researchers published a “consensus statement” on cannabis products and health risks that stated the “increased risk imposed from using higher potency cannabis products is particularly concerning for young users and those with certain pre-existing mental health conditions.” 
      • That year, Davis helped add add $100,000 to the UW Center for Cannabis Research (UW CCR) and WSU budgets to develop research frameworks on “measuring and assessing impairment due to cannabis use” and any “Correlation between age of use, dosage of use, and appearance of occurrence of cannabis induced psychosis.”
      • In 2021, she cited the statement when pushing for another bill to regulate cannabis concentrates which also wasn’t advanced by legislators.
    • During the 2022 legislative session, Davis sponsored HB 2035, "Establishing a behavioral health prevention and equity impact framework for the Washington state liquor and cannabis board" (WSLCB), which was heard, but not advanced, by WA House COG on January 25th. She was among the signatories to a a January 19th letter to Governor Jay Inslee supporting the appointment of Jim Vollendroff to the WSLCB board due to his background in public and behavioral health and because “we deeply value his lived experience as a person in recovery from both mental health and substance use challenges and as a biracial member of the LGBTQ community.”
    • Earlier in the event, Davis mentioned her past work with another presenter, UW professor Jason Kilmer, when introducing his remarks, "Cannabis Use by Young Adults: Trends and Considerations."
  • Davis pointed out that in February 2021, “I was actually speaking on a bill to decriminalize—not legalize but decriminalize—possession of all drugs” when she had “to step out of that committee to testify on a bill in Representative Kloba’s committee to cap the potency of cannabis concentrates.” Acknowledging how “people find that conflicting actually,” she commented, “in my opinion it's not. I can care deeply about prevention and deeply believe that treatment works and that people can and do recover.”
  • After voters in the state legalized cannabis in 2012 through Initiative 502, Davis considered it “pretty clear that the individuals thought that they were legalizing cannabis the plant and that what people thought they were legalizing is not the cannabis we heard about today.” She argued the initiative didn’t legalize cannabis, “we commercialized THC in the state of Washington and I think there's an enormous gap between the public awareness of what's happening and this conversation.” Davis felt that “alcohol wasn't necessarily hugely problematic societally until it was distilled, tobacco as we heard today wasn't necessarily hugely problematic until the invention of the cigarette, and cannabis wasn't necessarily hugely problematic until it became highly concentrated and highly potent.” Despite her admittedly “fairly myopically focused” concern over concentrates, Davis appreciated having heard other speakers “today highlighting the myriad of concerns related to legalization that transcend the issues related to high potency cannabis products.”
  • Davis wanted to speak to “what I might call myth versus reality, things the cannabis industry says” while lobbying for their businesses “and one of the things they will consistently say regarding something like a potency cap or or banning products is that everything will go to the black market and it will be an abject failure.” However, she pointed to the keynote on “Market Trends in High Potency Cannabis Products” from Jonathan Caulkins to claim it was “not true that not every ban is an abject failure that it doesn't always go to the black market.”
  • Davis also challenged how representatives of cannabis companies portrayed their own customers, “what they describe as the prototypical cannabis consumer…a soccer mom who uses concentrates to relax.” Instead, she claimed that the symposium presenters “repeatedly” demonstrated that demographic “represents one in 50 of the customers and that the other customers are either underaged, addicted, or using extremely heavily.”
  • In her previous work at UW “in suicide prevention specifically,” Davis remembered, “one of the biggest gaps we faced in the world of suicidology was that the general public didn't understand that there was a nexus between firearms and suicide. That firearm ownership itself put everyone in a household at risk for suicide.” She also believed that “in this country, there's almost no one who is unaware that there is a nexus between alcohol use in pregnancy and birth defects.” However, “the general public does not understand the likes of what we discussed today.”
  • Davis acknowledged that “as much as I spend time thinking about and researching this topic,” she’d learned “an incredible amount today and I truly do not understand why being the first state [to legalize] that this is not on the front page at the Seattle Times because it's extremely troubling.” She felt lawmakers should fear “a generational increase in schizophrenia and other psychotic disorders and the toll that that takes on state systems and as it relates to homelessness and criminal legal implications and state hospitals, and could we do something now to stem that tide, and are we not?” 
    • Seattle Times coverage of the symposium on October 4th emphasized Davis’ perspective that the cannabis industry was a “failed experiment” and her intention “to propose new legislation based on the researchers’ findings.”
    • If you or someone you know is contemplating suicide, please reach out to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline by calling 988, or find additional suicide prevention tools from the Washington State Department of Health (DOH).
  • Davis reiterated how uninformed she thought most people were on the topic, since she’d been called “every name in the book: Nancy Reagan, Reefer Madness, because they don't know they're still using this availability heuristic and thinking about cannabis this harmless plant.” Davis felt anyone attending the symposium would have come away with the same impression as her, but the “public is not ‘woke’ on this topic. So the only option is for the legislature to become woke very quickly, and to have a serious amount of political courage to take that step and it's absolutely in my opinion the right step to take…these much-needed public health measures.”
  • “And the last comment I'll make is about equity,” Davis told attendees, “cannabis legalization in the state was really sold as an equity measure. It was sold under this veneer of anti-racism and social justice, but what struck me today was the comments about what happens when you have a cannabis retailer close to your home and the increase in use and increase in frequency, [and] duration of use.” Davis had noticed some local officials were “concentrating cannabis stores in the state of Washington the same way we concentrate alcohol stores, tobacco stores, in communities of color and lower income communities.”
    • The practice of zoning certain businesses in areas with economically disadvantaged minority-majority populations is a type of redlining which had been previously documented in other legal cannabis jurisdictions. The D.C. Fiscal Policy Institute warned against the practice in their February 2021 report: First in Line, covering equitable cannabis policies. A study suggesting cannabis retail zoning had a relation to cannabis use disorder was studied by Kilmer and other Washington researchers in March 2022.
    • Among people claiming to represent communities of color to the WSLCB and Washington State Legislative Task Force on Social Equity in Cannabis (WA SECTF), most have called for greater access to cannabis licensing, including more stores in their neighborhood. City officials in Tacoma requested more retail outlets in 2020, and Seattle's city council passed ordinances to allow more cannabis licensing specifically for equity purposes on September 6th.
    • According to a June 2021 WA SECTF Licensing Work Group presentation, Washington had the lowest number of cannabis stores per capita of legal cannabis states.
  • Davis concluded that the cannabis sector in the state was “a predatory industry…they’re preying on the vulnerable: the young, people of color, people predisposed to mental illness. And in my opinion, it is the job of policy makers to do the right thing and to respond to this what is becoming a public health emergency quite quickly.”
  • At publication time, Davis was running for re-election to her seat against Republican Anthony Hubbard.

• Senator Jesse Salomon speculated on the “veto power” cannabis stakeholders had over legislation in the sector, and that lawmakers should consider what's best for communities rather than being stridently pro- or anti-cannabis legalization (audio - 4m, video).
  • The senator from the 32nd district, Salomon represented the same district as Davis in the Washington State Senate (WA Senate). He mentioned serving on “the Law and Justice Committee in the Senate so we do deal with drugs, but from a policy perspective more on the criminalization and/or decriminalization issue…slightly less from a public health perspective.”
    • Salomon spoke up in committee hearings involving legislation on cannabis retail in 2019 and medical patient arrest protections in 2021.
    • The senator offered remarks in support of passing SB 5476, “Addressing the State v. Blake decision,” in April 2021, mentioning his experience with clients who were substance users as a public defender.  
  • “I was proud to have introduced, along with representative Davis,” a senate companion to Davis’ bill, SB 6332, aiming “to cap THC content at 10%...for the concentrates,” he explained. Salomon chalked up the bill’s failure to running “into a buzzsaw by the industry…I don't mean to imply that industry has veto power per se in the legislature, but…it certainly makes it a challenge to pass” that kind of policy. The top concern he had was “seeing those increased rates of psychosis in young people” allegedly due to a cannabis plant “which is not, sort of, your parents plant, right? It's been engineered to have higher potency.” He agreed with Davis that “this is sort of a different drug.”
    • Both before and after cannabis legalization, officials had warned about increasing cannabinoid concentrations. A 2019 VICE News article explored problems with widely-cited historical cannabis potency data, in which Mahmoud ElSohly, professor of pharmaceutics at the University of Mississippi and director of the school's Marijuana Project—which oversees the Potency Monitoring Program—noted “before he took charge in 1981, the [U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration] DEA often didn’t provide samples...until after the cases were disposed of legally, ElSohly explained, meaning they were often a few years old” and “didn't really represent the real strength of the drug at the time that people actually bought and consumed it.”
    • The 2007 book Lies, Damned Lies, and Drug War Statistics: A Critical Analysis of Claims Made by the Office of National Drug Control Policy covered more problems in tracking cannabinoid concentrations, looking at sometimes shifting federal statements on the increase in cannabis strength and possible impacts.
  • Salomon also sponsored a bill in the 2022 legislation to legalize medical use of psilocybin mushrooms “under guided, supervised, and certified ‘trip sitting.’” He offered this as evidence that “we can have a grown-up nuanced discussion about drug policy and different drugs and we don't have to either be labeled as Nancy Reagan anti-drug, or…100% pro-legalization, right? We're trying to hit the marks on public health.”
    • Mushrooms had received increasing attention since Oregon legalized the practice in 2020, with legalization or study of medical use being approved in Connecticut, Utah, and Texas while other states contemplated the move. The Washington State Health Care Authority (WA HCA) received $200,000 to study “psilocybin services wellness and opportunities” as part of the 2022 supplemental budget. Director Rick Garza was appointed to represent the WSLCB and the report was due by December 2023.
  • Hopeful “that we can sort of stakeholder this bill a little bit more as a result of this and bring everybody in so that it has a chance of passing,” Salomon tried to connect regulation of cannabinoid concentrations with other social ills faced by legislators. He was concerned that “cannabis use disorders is a precursor and one entree into mental health, addiction, homelessness.” Finding that elected officials had been “charged by our community to unravel that through drug policy, criminal justice policy, housing policy…I consider this all an aspect of the work we need to do to move forward.”
  • At publication time, Salomon was running for re-election to his seat against Democrat Patricia Weber.